Sounds like you are doing well though - hope you can keep it up, I somestimes find a productive writing day can be followed by an unproductive one, especially if I really push myself.

Met my goals for today, and I really feel like I've made progress. It feels good - I hadn't realised quite how muhc of a slump I'd been in until now. But I have a meeting for a voluntary group I chair so have to stop now. Feel like I deserve a relaxing evening of telly after the meeting, and then a nice early night :-) I am such a saddo....

Well done everyone who has been productive today, unfortunately I've been quite poorly for the past few days so progress is a bit slow. After a busy non-PhD morning and a sleep this afternoon I'm only really starting to work now - first goal is to email supervisor with details of a meeting I went to on his behalf last Friday, then I want to write 500 words on some reading I have done, have to send supervisors some writing on Friday.

Morning everyone. My goal today is again to write 1000 words. I really hit a brick wall yesterday afternoon so I finished early and went to the gym but today I am aiming to put in a good day. My first goal is to write 500 words by lunch time.

Good luck star-shaped! And morning everyone else.

I'm still feeling fired up and enthusiastic, which is a good thing. I have a seminar for an hour at 11 and supervision at 2, so need to prepare for both. So, goals for today:

1.) Prepare for this morning's seminar (DONE)
2.) Make notes on latest thoughts to discuss in supervision (may take a while!!)
3.) Go to supervision meeting and then write up notes afterwards
4.) If there's any time left over, look at revising questionnaire
5.) Go swimming

Hi everyone,

I hope nobody minds but I thought I would join in today! I am lacking in motivation at the moment and this thread seems like a great idea!

So my goals for today were
- Catch up on some emails (done)
- Code 2 of interviews in Nvivo
- Read methodology chapter from a similar thesis for inspiration for my own
- Walk the dog who is already begging to go out!

Hope everyone has a good day! :)

Good morning sarahlouise, batfink and star-shaped!

I've ridden my horse so that's my first goal done, just need to make myself look presentable then I can get on with some real work!

First goal is to write 500 words on what I started yesterday by lunchtime. I have to go to work at 3pm so hopefully I'll be able to do that and something else before then.

Good luck everyone!

i hope that everyone is having a productive day!

I have written 500 words. Yay. This includes rewriting some stuff from yesterday and I also feel like I have a really clear idea of the structure of the chapter now. However this isn't a chapter which I have discussed with my supervisors so I hope it'll be OK. I'm at a weird stage as I won't be working with my current supervisor for much longer as my main sup is finishing his sabbatical this month but he doesn't know the ins and outs of how everything has been going over the last year. Anyway, I'm just getting on with it and having confidence in where I'm going.

My next goal is to write 500 more words before the end of the day.

Afternoon everyone :) wow everyone is being so productive!

okay, my next goal is to do data analysis on study 3 (yeah I know, I haven't done study 1 and 2, but study 3 seems more clear and so I thought I'd get myself started off on the easiest one!)

oh wait, I need to ring my mother on the other side of the world first....

======= Date Modified 01 Feb 2011 15:21:25 =======
Bleugh, mind-numbing supervision session. My supervisors are great and fab and give me wonderful support and advice, but just occasionally they do wind me up...

I quite often produce a bullet-pointed summary of the main things I've been thinking about since we last met, and we use that summary as the basis for discussion. Today's conversation went:
Supervisor: So maybe you need to go back to your aims and objectives here?
Me: Yes, I have done - you can see that on the summary I gave you, it's the very next item
Supervisor: Well, you probably haven't looked at them since doing your first year report
Me: No, I have looked at them, look, they're under the heading 'Items drawn from aims and objectives'
Supervisor: Yes, but these aren't from your aims and objectives, are they?
Me: Yes, they are. I've listed them and then related them to the gaps in the literature, as you can see on the paper in front of you.
Supervisor: But it looks like you've expanded the aims and objectives?
Me: No, I haven't, I've just added in details of the gaps in the literature that they relate to.
Supervisor: Well, do make sure that you go back to the aims and objectives, because it's easy to drift away from the focus of your research at this stage, so make sure you look at them....
Me: (aarrggh, bang head on desk)

Anyway, my final goals for today are to write up the notes from that meeting and then go swimming. I don't have the brain power for any more work than that!

Batfink, sorry to hear that you felt like you were going in circles with your sup.

I think we need to build a wall in this thread where everyone can bash their head against from time to time... I know I often feel like doing so myself...

Batfink I know the feeling. My supervisors are also very helpful (at times) but sometimes look at me like they have no idea what I am talking about.

I managed to achieve my goals for the day but I don't think I was that ambitious to start with to be honest. Just reading an article then giving up for the day I think.

Have a good evening all:-)

Afternoon all! I guess some of you will be putting the pens down for the evening but mine is about to get picked up lol. Sorry to hear about your sups session Batfink. I can hear the head banging loud and clear.

I have had a productive weekend and now this evening I have graphs to annotate and add into the chapters. I will start with ch 4 but have 5 and 6 to do aswell! We will see how the evening goes and how many expletives I can muster while importing Excel graphs into Word :$

ok I have a pretty newb stats question. I am terrible at stats! I only use it every year or so, so I forget it all by the time I need to use it again.

Anyway, I would be very grateful if someone can be patient enough with me and walk me through my first write up with stats....

I carried out a study to see if participants give the same answer to a questionnaire in two different formats. so I ran a within-subject study where they answer the same questions but once on a computer, and once on paper (exactly the same questions, same layout, etc).

I have 1 ratio (age), 1 nominal (yes/no), and 4 ordinal (opinions on Likert-scale) measures.

I would like to see if answering the questions in the different formats had any effects or if the two can be used interchangeably.

Am I correct in thinking that I need to run correlation tests for each measurement and if they all come out to correlate, then I can draw the conclusion that they can be used interchangeably?

I am also guessing that I will need different correlational tests for the ratio, nominal and ordinal measures, am I correct in this?

Thank you in for anyone that has taken the time to read this :)

I think if you're going to do a correlation, then you can use kendall's tau - I could be wrong, check in Field (2009)! but I think you can use that for all of them.

Thank you ever so much for replying so quickly Sneaks.

I do have Field 2009, so I will look into kendall's :) Sometimes, you get so overwhelmed with such a big book that you don't know where to look, and you need someone to say "ok, start by looking into that bit", which is exactly what you did, so thank you very much :)